Friday, September 30, 2016

Need to clean out the to-be-blogged-about items I've got building up in feedly. Prefer the one-post-per-link-or-subject approach, but the backlog is too daunting. So, it's a digest post. Possibly the first of several?

Friday, September 23, 2016

I'm not going to say the fact that three women played in the Negro Leagues is the most interesting thing to come out of watching, then reading about, Fox's Pitch because the show was better than I thought it'd be. Not without problems, but better than the mess it might've been.

Will give this one a few more episodes to see where it goes. A primetime network drama about baseball is something I want to like, and it doesn't hurt that it's premise gives it a myriad of interesting directions to go in.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

I've been slow to check out the Kindle First selections that are starting to back up in my "to read" queue, but it's largely because I've been grabbing some recent Hugo award winning authors I was asleep on. N.K. Jemisin and Ann Leckie have woke me up. The Puppies, and their attempts to game the Hugos in the name of patriarchy and white nationalism for the last few years, have overshadowed, to some degree, how good the winners have been.

On the non-fiction side, Haidt's The Righteous Mind was an intriguing read -- perhaps supplying the science behind what many have argued is the insufferable arrogance of the New Atheism. (Mind, it doesn't make a case for the existence of a deity, nor does it suggest government and religion should be intertwined; rather, it puts the case for religiosity being more than a manifestation of a parasitic, viral meme in terms rationalists will be open to.)

Long time Tryptic Cryptic / c-i-e favorite Kevin Murphy has co-authored a new book, The Past and Future City, which will be released in October. The review call it "an articulate call to action that should be of interest to scholars, community organizers, and policy makers in municipalities across the country." Neither scholar, organizer, nor policy maker myself, I plan to read it because the case for historic preservation is one that ought to made for, and by, the citizenry at large.